


The Untitled Christmas Fic

by christinefromsherwood



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Christmas, Crack Treated Seriously, Established Relationship, Fluff and Humor, Humor, M/M, raise your hands if you've been personally victimised by james bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28029960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/christinefromsherwood/pseuds/christinefromsherwood
Summary: It is a beautiful day and Bond is a horrible, horrible agent.
Relationships: James Bond/Q
Comments: 38
Kudos: 76
Collections: MI6 Cafe Collections





	The Untitled Christmas Fic

**Author's Note:**

> written for the MI6 Cafe Challenge: In the Dark December :D I chose to take it figuratively. Everyone is in the dark, characters and readers :)
> 
> Many thanks to Souffle for the beta and also for the prompt.

When Eve nipped out to the Accounting kitchenette for some of their famous shortbread during her coffee break and overheard two of A’s minions--faces red; tears streaming down their cheeks--saying: “I can’t! I can’t, Barry.” and “Phylis, he nearly killed me. I almost died!”, she didn’t think much of it. Accountants were famously very high-strung.

Nibbling on her biscuit, she managed to ignore a few more whimpers and traumatized faces as she made her way back to her office, humming about how the snow lay all deep and crisp and even and may nothing you dismay. 

Later on, though, when Kevin came by to hand over some of Bond’s overdue reports, she began to suspect something was amiss. Kevin was usually friendly and chatty. As Bond’s secretary he had to be able to roll with the punches; Eve had never seen him anything less than meticulously put together. But that was before, now...

Hair in disarray, tie crooked, jacket... _unbuttoned_?! 

“What has he done?!” Eve yelped out before she could stop herself and watched Kevin jump at the sound. 

“Don’t. Please,” groaned Kevin. “Please, don’t ask. Just-” He thrust the files at her, then turned on his heel and hurried off, jacket flapping in the tailwind. 

Eve fell back into her office chair, stunned. 

This was… not good. 

This was _bad_. 

She looked at the intercom button on her landline and bit her lip. 

If it was anything like last time… Well, M needed to know in any case. They had protocols for this for a reason after all. 

Eve stilled her trembling fingers and pressed the button. 

“Sir.” 

“Moneypenny?” M’s voice came immediately, relaxed and cheerful. He had no idea that her next words were about to ruin his whole day. (No, not his _whole_ day, Moneypenny consoled herself. He had to go to his niece’s school nativity at 5; nothing Bond conceived could be worse. Surely.)

“Code Avocado. Sir. We have a Code Avocado.” 

Silence. Then the office door flew open.

“No.”

“I’m afraid so, sir.” 

“It’s impossible.” M was shaking his head, tugging at his cufflinks anxiously. “We would have noticed the signs!”

“We must have missed them.”

“Bill-”

“I will call Bill immediately.”

“Yes! Yes. Call him. Call Bill.”

It turned out that Bill was already on his way. And that he had as little idea about what was going on as they did. 

“You haven’t seen him then?” Eve asked and ended the call as Bill appeared in the doorway.

“No.” He shook his head. “But I saw Narang, who saw _Kevin_. By all accounts, it’s bad.”

Eve nodded. “I saw Kevin. It’s bad.”

M tugged at his cufflinks once more. Then he straightened his back and nodded decisively. 

“I don’t like sending you in blind, but there’s nothing for it. We can’t risk further exposure.” He swallowed heavily. “We _cannot afford_ a repeat of July 10.” 

Eve felt a chill run down her spine. 

“Yes, sir.”

“Find him,” M continued, “as soon as possible. Find out what he’s doing and... Make. Him. Stop.” He paused, allowing himself a heavy exhale. “By any means necessary.”

“And if the Quartermaster is involved, sir?” Bill voiced what Eve was thinking. 

“Then God help us all.”

And so they went. 

Bond wasn’t in his office. He wasn’t in the gym. Or on the roof. Or in the agents’ break room. Except for the roof, however, there were signs that he _had_ been to all those places: broken teaware, scattered files, the arterial spray of coffee on the walls...

Neither of them said it, but both of them knew that there was no chance of limiting exposure now. Possibly only Medical was still in the dark. Blissfully out of the loop. Unscarred.

Well, Medical and _them_. 

“He’s in Q-branch, isn’t he,” Bill hummed stoically, like a man who’d strolled off a cliff and realised it with only just enough time to look into the camera before letting gravity claim its due.

Eve shrugged her shoulders. “Or he could just be on his way there?” 

“We are not that lucky, Miss Moneypenny.” 

Privately, she agreed. “Well, at least there’s no critical ongoing missions, right?”

“True, true.” He nodded. “But there _was_ a delivery of GTN scheduled for right about now, so...”

Eve suppressed a desperate screech that tried to claw its way out of her throat. 

“Bill, MI6 can’t have its headquarters blow up for the _third time_ in as many years! We have to stop him!”

“Oh, do you think so?”

They both froze as the sound of humming came from several corridors over. It was a very deep, self-satisfied humming. The humming of a man who knew he could do terrible things with impunity; who could ruin an entire day with a single pun and did so often and with pleasure.

“...FIVE GOLD RINGS...” Bond sang out before the closing of the stairwell door muffled the sound.

“Fuck!” They tore off to the lifts, the soles of their shoes skidding on the floor tiles as they rounded one corner, then another before hurling themselves at the closing door.

It was only after it shut behind them and the lift began to ascend with a quiet _ding_ that they realised their mistake. 

“No!” 

“Fuck!”

“We should have split up and gone after him, Eve! I thought you were going to take the stairs!” wailed Bill, eyes glued to the ever growing, glowing digit above the lift buttons that was taking them away from the Q branch floors and towards the son of a tauntaun who’d called for their lift.

“Oh, shut up and give me your badge!” 

“Why?”

“So we can save Christmas! Why do you think?!” she barked and ripped it out of his sweaty palms. She jammed the badge against the sensor and began to punch in the override. “I left mine in the o- Oh fuck, is it 24310 or 24301?! Which one is it?! Bill!”

“Aaaah.”

“Bill!”

“01! Definitely 01!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. No? Yes!”

With another soft ding the lift began to move downwards. 

“Thank fuck.” Eve sagged against one mirrored wall. 

“We should have gone after him,” Bill repeated sadly.

“Yeah well…”

“But we should still get there before him. I think. Right? Yes. Certainly, the lift is faster. It has to be.” Eve watched him dab at his sweaty forehead with his handkerchief as he tried to gather himself. Bill had never trained as a field agent and sometimes it showed.

“It all depends on the GTN shipment, really,” he continued. “Our only chance to prevent calamity is to try to keep the two hazards as isolated as possible.”

Eve nodded. “Worst case scenario Bond and the GTN arrive at the same time-”

“Don’t even-”

“But if they don’t--and they shouldn’t--I’ll take Bond and herd him somewhere and you’ll watch the boffins put away the explodey stuff. Yeah?”

“Agreed.”

They watched the numbers count down as the lift moved downwards, slower that it had ever moved before, Eve was sure. 

“It will be fine,” Bill announced with sudden and--Eve thought--misplaced confidence. “After all, we haven’t even seen him, have we? We might be overreacting. It’s probably not as bad-”

Eve hated to dash his hopes. “We _have_ seen the coffee on the walls of the _agents’_ breakroom, though.” 

“Right.”

When G for ground floor glowed red in the dim light of the lift, they readied themselves in front of the door with grim determination. 

_-1_

“Is the service lift to the left or to the right?”

_-2_

“Left.”

_-3_

“Right- ehm- thank you.”

_-4_

“Good luck.”

The lift door opened.

With one last nod towards each other, they separated: Bill towards the service lift and Eve to assess the situation.

Boffins in colourful tees were sat at their desks in neat rows. Next to them, in the corridors, boffins in lab coats rushed past the boffins in blue overalls who preferred loitering around the bullpen to spending their lunch break in the garages. All seemed calm in Q branch. 

Eve didn’t trust it; she rushed to the nearest table.

“Is he here?” 

“Who?” The boffin--Stevens?--blinked at her owlishly. Eve gritted her teeth.

“Bond. Is Bond here?”

“Who?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Stevens!”

Then: “No!” That was Bill!

Eve swung around just in time to see Bill throw himself bodily through space in an attempt to catch something a boffin standing by the open service lift let fall.

Was it the explosive? Was it a phone?! It was dark and fairly small and... Bill’s body thudded heavily against the floor with the thing clutched securely to his chest. The forklift next to him finished lowering its precious cargo undisturbed by the collision of its remote control with the body of MI6’s Chief of Staff.

“Haha, nice catch, Bill! Good morning!” said Bond.

Eve whipped her head around only to see him turn and start walking towards Q’s office to the sound of dropped cups, pens and jaws. She blinked, unsure of what she had seen, and went after him.

It must have been her imagination. She had simply built the whole thing up in her head too much, she couldn’t have seen what she thought she had. Because if she had... If she had...

Oh, it was so much worse than the _¡Avogato!_ T-shirt he had stolen from Q in July! And that was _mint green_ , two sizes too small and had a half-cat, half-avocado monstrosity on the front!

Eve was moved towards the glass wall of Q’s office, pushed forward by the wave of bewildered Q branchers. 

“What? No! You’re joking,” said one.

“I’m not, though,” answered another.

“Or you’ve sniffed too many fumes in the lab. You know, they give us those facemasks and goggles for a reason.”

“I’m telling the truth, he’s really wearing-”

And then Eve saw him, or rather she saw **_IT_**.

There was green, and red, and yellow, and white, and purple, and _brown_. There was stuff that twinkled, stuff that bobbed, stuff sticking--

Eve blinked, trying to jog her brain into making sense of the revolting display before her eyes.

It was a mostly green sweater. She thought that was safe to say. A sweater, the cuffs of which were hemmed with felt holly leaves. Eve didn’t think she could bear to look at the front fully yet, but there was nothing to be done. On the front was- There was- 

She exhaled slowly through her nose.

Well, it was a reindeer head on a snowy plain. That was the gist of it, anyway. 

Only there were white woollen bobbles on the snowy plain too. And the antlers of the reindeer were made of tinsel, and there was an actual knitted scarf around the reindeer’s neck, and the reindeer was Rudolph and-

“Oh, James, it looks wonderful!” Q’s excited chirping could be heard quite clearly even through the heavy glass. “You know, I wasn’t sure if I got your size right, but it’s a perfect fit!”

“Darling, I love it. Thank you,” Bond replied, the light in his eyes all soft and warm, and Eve found herself preferring to actually look at the terrible reindeer, only the reindeer was Rudolph and-

“Have you tried the nose yet?” 

“Hmm. I showed the boys in the breakroom. They loved it.”

Q’s smile was blinding as he reached out and pressed at Rudolph’s massive red bulge of a nose in the centre of Bond’s torso.

The high beepy strains of _Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer_ could be heard through the heavy glass again, and what was it even there for and Eve was going to go mad any second because on _you would even say it glows_ the nose _lit up_ and began _flashing_!

“What do we do? What _can_ we do, Eve, in the face of such...?” Bill whimpered from beside her. He must have waded through the crowd to her while she was stunned, staring at Bond.

Eve closed her eyes and forced herself to look away.

“We will issue a building-wide warning,” she said hoarsely. “And then we will start lobbying against in-agency relationships again.” 

“Or stricter dress regulations, at the least.” Bill nodded grimly and together they turned and made their way back to the lift. 

It was time to get to work.

**Author's Note:**

> So, what do you think? Anti-climax or no? Did you enjoy being in the dark for the majority of the fic? Let me know in the comments. They feed my shriveled writer soul.
> 
> If you want to see the wonderful art that inspired Bond's avogato fashion crime, have a look [here (art by Nana-chan)](https://mi6-cafe.tumblr.com/post/626886117530189824/for-mi6-cafes-art-prompt-challenge-week-3-00q) and [here (art by MrKsan). ](https://mi6-cafe.tumblr.com/post/626903308419923969/for-mi6-cafe-weekle-art-challenge-laundry-day-at)


End file.
